[flagged]
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
91–100 of 606 posts
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#92I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…
The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses o…
And now we're paying 10x the fraction of our gdp as the early non war days.
The feds are bleeding us dry to line they and their corrupt friends pockets and their public debt.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#93So a stock market and/or real estate crash can actually be good to reduce inequality . In fact I think its about the only way to dramatically reduce inequality. Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.
You guys are so obsessed with inequality because you're always looking in the other guy's cup. I don't care about inequality at all - only absolute living standards. The US has been an unequal place all its history and it's a tremendous country to live in. Here's a recipe for happiness: stop comparing yourself to others and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. It's old advice, but it's clearly been forgotten.
> I don't care about inequality at all
cheap products from 3rd world
cheap nature resources from 3rd world
cheap labor from 3rd world
that's why many of the free citizens of the Empire don't need to care about inequality at all
when these things change, you will care
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#94Financial education - spending less, saving up, and investing - is common sense but maybe needs to be taught in school. Or maybe the new sovereign wealth fund will indirectly reduce this inequality without needing every individual to take action. Not sure what other options there are.
“Guhuh just fununcially aducate urself” Do they teach in school how to invest when you can barely afford food and have no disposable income? Must be easy to talk shit when sitting on your cushy white collar job. Stop simping for billionaires, it’s pathetic.
If you read the article you would see that every bracket has some disposable income. The middle 60% (which isn’t the top 10% from the headline) spends more than $1000 a year on vacation. Cut that in half and invest $500 a year into the market and you would have a few hundred thousand for retirement (way more than typical retirement savings).
Also, in response to these…
> “Guhuh just fununcially aducate urself”
> Must be easy to talk shit when sitting on your cushy white collar job.
> Stop simping for billionaires, it’s pathetic.
…I suggest reading the site guidelines:
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#95I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…
The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses o…
> 250 years ago George Washington
His wealth was mainly in very illiquid land. A lot of it was near worthless unless US won the war since it was beyond the line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and white settlers were generally banned from settling there.
Otherwise like many landholders back in the day he was semi-broke and had limited access to cash.
Of course after the war of course he was both compensated for his expenses and got “his” land in Ohio (more or less)
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 2008 stock market crash famously reduced inequality. Definitely didn't increase inequality by leaving the average person (via government bailouts) holding the bag.
I'm assuming sarcasm here. The 2008 crash was immediately offset by huge rounds of QE that most of them went to bail out financial institutions and inadvertently further inflated the prices of most assets. It may have been necessary, I don't know, but the bottom line is the stock market (and all assets generally) was inflated with huge sums of new money.
so how does this align with your opinion/idea that a stock market crash today would reduce inequality? more likely the same thing would just happen again.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#97I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…
Global average age is higher than it has ever been and it keeps climbing. My stupid take is, we will continuously live in unprecedented territories for the foreseeable future, because needs, wants, abilities, thinking style of humans change as they age.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#98Sincere question about communism: Let's say hypothetically that the distribution of stock ownership was more even across the population, and variance was largely (but not completely) due to length of time in the workforce. And further, that the stock owned by workers is a large enough block that they effectively have controlling shares at many companies. Maybe I'm talking about a different universe, but please imagin…
That's just a cooperative, and those exist in capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative.
You can found one today if you want, don't need communism for that.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#99I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…
It’s different this time around. The sheer complexity of society makes it hard to ascertain exactly the true nature of the situation. People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it th…
Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on.
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#100[flagged]
Can we all agree to flag comments that outsource their thinking to LLMs?